The Burger Shoppe, 688 Queen Street East, west of Broadview

By the way, I’m still on that Eating Better kick, just so you know. But I have to say, on weekends I do love my takeout. There’s me, my daughter Evangeline 16, and my son, Freddy,14, whose hankerings are often in competition. “Why is Friday always pizza night?” my daughter always complains, Because Freddy says so. You do not want to mess with tradition. Last Friday though, we sent him to the movies and ordered Indian behind his back. Evangeline has expanded her palette greatly over the last 2 years but! since her biology class dissected a pig a month ago, pork products have become verboten. The pickled piglet in question resembled our barrel bodied, stumpy legged dog, Betty. Pigs are now too cute to eat. I don’t care about pork chops but I love bacon in all its forms so when I’m out, you can be sure I order it. Il Fornello makes the best fig pizza with proscuitto, by the way. And how can you eat a perogi without a bacon bits? Don’t get me started….anyway, last Friday we ordered a bunch of lentils and chick peas from Makkah (1020 Danforth Ave 416-406-2500) and it was yum! The next night, Freddy, aka Jughead Jones, demanded burgers. Now I will eat almost anything happily but I usually feel kind of meh about burgers and of course, Evangeline is slowly becoming more righteously vegetarian but no one felt like arguing so off we went to The Burger Shoppe. http://www.burgershoppe.com/newsite1/splash.html

They use naturally raised beef (a happy cow is a delicious cow) and have all kinds of cool condiments…I amost ordered bacon for mine but I thought that would be kind of overkill so to speak. Instead I had carmelized onions, chipotle aoli, and blue cheese and it was fantastic. We all agreed, best burgers around! This Burger Shoppe is a small place but really cute and they have other locations in the west end. Here we had a choice of exotic sodas like spruce beer. The burgers themselves are just the right size, not like those massive ones a few doors east at Dangerous Dan’s who gets his inspiration from the Double D’s across the street at Jilly’s. They make them how you want them, rare, medium, well done. Ours were medium (ever so slightly pink in the middle) which were perfect. It’s a bit pricier than your average burger anywhere else but definitely worth it. And Freddy forgot about pizza. Another tradition is born.